


This Is Not The Room

by Funkspiel



Series: Kinktober 2017 [12]
Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: Camera Woman!Tina, Claustrophobia, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Producer!Percival, TV Show Host!Newt, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-17
Updated: 2017-10-17
Packaged: 2019-01-18 13:15:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12388815
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Funkspiel/pseuds/Funkspiel
Summary: Producer Percival Graves often cursed the day the network execs had assigned him this show. Nature Show Host Newt Scamander was going to be the death of him one day, he always said. He wondered if today was the day.Day 16: Sensory Deprivation





	This Is Not The Room

**Author's Note:**

  * For [QED_Scribblings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/QED_Scribblings/gifts), [kallistob](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kallistob/gifts).



**DAY 16: Sensory Deprivation**

Not for the first time, Graves cursed the day the network executives had assigned him to produce this show. Newt, the talent behind the strangely and outrageously successful TV hit show ‘ _Life As We Know It’,_ was a hurricane crammed into human skin. Determined, despite his introverted nature, to expose the dying beauty of the world in an effort to save it. Wrangling ‘dangerous’ animals to showcase the significance of protecting them. Finding rare and exotic creatures to give a face to the name ‘endangered’. Constantly stepping outside of his comfort zone to spread his love with a loveless, hopeless world bogged down in politics and taxes and problems. Offering solutions with the problems he highlighted, all in gentle, excited words — contagious and loved by many around the world. 

Newt — the man Percival was being paid to follow into jungles and swamps and oceans and _caves_. Newt — the man that had somehow stolen his heart while simultaneously leading a city boy through the mud. Newt — the man that currently was running through a dark, narrow cave like a man possessed.

Graves reached out for him, a short cry of “ _Newt, don’t!”_ on his lips, but the redhead managed to slip between his fingers and between the dreadfully thin part in the cave walls ahead of them. 

“No time, Mr. Graves!” He called, his voice echoing merrily as he lost himself in his element, unheeding of the dark or the dangers of a cave as dark and dank and slick as this. 

“Damn it, Newt!” Tina cursed before sliding in after him, maneuvering the camera equipment expertly so that her lithe body and rig could both fit. “I can’t film you if you don’t _stay with us_!” 

“It’s a rare and endangered animal, Ms. Tina! This can hardly wait!” 

And then they were gone, unheeding of his hesitation. He watched the light of the camera disappear, ebbing from between the cracks, and something old and forgotten panged heavily in his heart with a hitch. He paced the tiny space he had found himself in, trying to look at the crack from a different angle, hoping that would make the channel look less like a grave and more like something normal, something safe, something not at all like the dark room from all those years ago. 

He punched the wall, then hisses, his knuckles warm and wet and aching fiercely as the light on his breast flickered.

“No,” he whispered, his heart gone still with every phantom flash of dying light. “No, no, _no, no, no.”_

But just like then, his words did nothing to stop the inevitable. The sound of his friends died out, and all he had was the small room— _no, cave, Percival. You’re in a cave, you’re not there. You’re not—_ and the sound of his own rushed breathing. Listening desperately over the roar of his heartbeat for any sound of the enemy coming for him. To ask more questions. Yearning for more questions, god, because at first he had feared the beatings but he would take anything over the barely five by eight closet they had locked him in. 

Locked away so long in a room kept so temperate that he’d lose track of his legs and his arms and the feeling of his skin. Echoes of his thoughts in his head tricking him as company. Panicked breathing sucking all air from the room, the walls closing in, and _oh god, he could feel them now. The walls. The walls were touching him, he couldn’t breathe, he couldn’t—_

He legs felt like jelly, and he tried to collapse but in the dark he missed the jagged rock beneath him. It struck him in the knee and, frightened, he wailed. He stumbled back but the wall was there — waiting for him — and oh god, why was their a rock in his cell? The walls were cold and wet. Had they moved him? When? He had missed his chance to get out of here and now he was going to die, forgotten in this box of stone. It might as well be his tomb.

He clutched his hands into his hair and screamed.

Somewhere outside the bubble of his panic, life stirred within the cave. Hands grabbed him, lights in his eyes disorienting him — a fear tactic, he knew, he wouldn’t tell them anything but _god don’t leave him alone again_ — and he clawed as the hands that gripped him.

He screamed and he howled like a man on fire, his belly a knot of dread knowing how pathetic he sounded, but he couldn’t stop the sounds from rising up his throat like bile. Choking him. Echoing. Suffocating him. 

Hands grabbed either side of his jaw and forced him to look straight.

Green eyes flecked with yellow and brilliant spatters of blue. A mouth, a beautiful mouth, moving silently beneath the roar of blood in his ears. The river of his dread deafening him. Thumbs brushed back the tide from his cheeks were the river had split and crept over his face. He blinked and the harsh kiss of the light lessened and the room became a cave once more.

They were back. They had come back.

And he had lost it.

He jerked back and away, his face alight with shame even as he shook, unable to stop. Cheeks surely trembling with the force of it. His breath short and sharp and wheezing even as he clenched his jaw and forced himself to count.

“Percival,” Newt said, and he could hear him now. “Percival, talk to us, please! Are you alright? Did something bite you?”

He shook his head, unable to reduce his eyes from their saucer wide stare, before finally shooting back the way they had came — back to the light and the lip of the cave and civilization. He laughed, sharp and hysterical at the thought that returning to the fucking jungle was _civilization_ for him now. He ignored their pleas for him to stop. Ignored them until he collapsed outside to his knees, trousers ruined with mud, and dug his hands into the evidence that proved he was not back in that POW cell. That Theseus and his squad had saved him, and he had lived, and he was a Producer for a leading non-fiction company now, and this was the show he had somehow gotten cursed with, and he was in the mud, away from that room, crying but alive.

Air filled his lungs, open and fresh and rainy. Hands took him by the shoulders and curled around him from behind, and while at first his body screamed to _get away_ , his heart screamed to be held. To be remembered. To be waited for. 

And Newt waited. He held him through the crying without asking one more question and waited. Holding him through the trembling and the mud and the snot that wrecked his handsome features. Until he was as limp and as hollow as the day he had been found in that base.

“Are you back?” Newt finally asked, and in his voice Percival heard nothing of the normally focused, excited Magizoologist. In it, he heard calm, safety, a rock foundation. Something to build the house of his sanity on. He let himself be held and latched onto the anchor Newt provided.

“Y-yes,” he finally stuttered. “Yes, god, I’m so sorry, Newt. How… how…”

“If you say foolish or silly or anything like it, so help me god, I will bridal carry you out of this forest and smother you the rest of the evening with so much softness you’ll wish you had cut yourself a break. You are not weak, Percival Graves,” Newt said firmly, his lips dreadfully close to the skin of Graves’ neck but not close enough. “You anything but weak.”

Graves snorted, but didn’t have the energy to argue.

He knew Tina was behind him, and he couldn’t bring himself to look and see if she was filming. He knew the network would want her too. Drama like his breakdown made for good TV. Made the show look on the edge and live and gritty. He knew she’d have a decision to make. That she’d be praised if she brought back this footage. And just…hoped. Hoped that she wouldn’t. 

She answered his question for him as she kneeled beside him, camera in its protective bag and a bottle of water uncapped and offered to him.

“Drink,” she said softly. Not pitying or anything of the sort. The same sort of tone she’d use if he had walked five miles and had forgotten to take a sip again. Simply and firmly, but kindly. Reminding him. 

He took the bottle with trembling hands and drank deeply.

And they waited for him, his TV crew turned friends. They waited for him in the rain. Never pressing.

When they returned to the hotel, Tina offered him a squeeze to the shoulder and a soft, “We’ll talk plans tomorrow morning. Rest up,” before disappearing in the direction of her room.

He thought Newt would be gone by now. The man was a ball of energy, impossible to keep in his room or even just keep up with, but when he turned around, Newt was there with a bottle of whiskey. 

There was something dreadfully raw and afraid in his eyes, but also…hope. He dipped his chin and struggled.

“The way I see it, you have two options. You can go to your room alone, and I’ll respect that. Or you can… join me. For a glass of whatever this is. And I’ll listen or I won’t ask, whatever you like.”

Graves hesitated, and he saw it the moment Newt flinched, ready to apologize — guilt, he realized, heavy in the way Newt held his shoulders. Guilt for having run ahead. ‘ _I don’t know if I’d be a good host for your show… There’s a reason why I work with animals, Mr. Graves._ _I’m an oblivious nuisance and a terror,’_ he remembered the man telling him once, smiling self-loathingly, ‘ _Ask anyone, you’ll get tired of me soon enough.’_

Just as broken as he was. 

Graves reached out for him and grabbed the wrist that held the liquor. He turned the bottle by rotating Newt’s wrist and regarded the label. 

“A good brand,” he murmured softly, though he didn’t _truly_ know. “I think it’ll do the trick. Give me a moment to shower and I’ll join you,” he finally said, and Newt’s trembling lips shook into a tentative smile.

“Sounds like a plan, Mr. Graves,” he said, unable to meet his gaze. “I promise I’ll stick with it, this time.”

Graves waved him off, stepping close, and said, “It’s your job to show the world these creatures, Newt. Please don’t beat yourself up because I was too broken to follow.”

“You’re not broken,” Newt interjected quickly. “You’re perfect,” only to flush immediately after.

Graves felt the icy stone that had been left in his heart from the cave slowly warm within his chest. He smiled bashfully, grateful, and shook his head.

“Well, right now I’m too smelly to be perfect. Twenty minutes?”

“Twenty minutes,” Newt nodded fiercely. 

He wasn’t in the room anymore, he reminded himself as he walked away from the beautiful, bumbling redhead that had stolen his heart with his passion and his zeal and his determination to show the states just how gorgeous the world was — how it needed to be protected. He couldn’t be.

Because Newt Scamander was in his life, and surely something that good could never exist in the room.


End file.
